Historic wildfires burn through Washington State

0:01WBUR Podcasts, Boston. My job is to communicate very clearly to everybody from the president on down just how dire and devastating the situation is here. Washington's governor says wildfires are devastating Spokane.

0:26It's Monday, August 3rd, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, President Trump's so-called anti-weaponization fund to pay out his allies and protect his family from tax audits is dead, according to a new memo from the acting attorney general. But is it really dead? Dead? It's just unclear to what extent this is going to be legally binding. Also, new rules for AI try to make the industry safer without constraining American companies too much in what many in the government see as a race with China. Each of these regulations actually impinges on the other goal.

1:10That story coming up in about 10 minutes. But first, wildfires have forced the evacuation of more than 60 ,000 people in Spokane County, Washington, raging through hot, dry grasslands and destroying hundreds of homes in what local officials have called the largest natural disaster in Spokane's history. We got in touch with Washington's governor, Bob Ferguson, who spoke to Robin Young from the Emergency Operations Center in Spokane. Well, it's devastating. And just so your listeners have an understanding, we're talking about within the city limits of Spokane. These are just neighborhoods in the city that have just been wiped out.

1:48Just unbelievable. It is. What are you doing for people? Yeah, so multiple things. So obviously we have first responders dealing with the crisis at hand of these fires that are not contained. These just swept through neighborhoods overnight last night. So truly devastating. Number two, obviously, we're working closely with all of our partners at the local, state, and federal level. I had a conversation with President Trump yesterday, multiple conversations with Secretary Mullen. We put in our request immediately to the federal government for an emergency declaration to get immediate relief. So we're just really moving on all fronts, as you might imagine, to get all the assistance we can for individuals when it comes to housing, who are now literally out of their homes, food, search and rescue, you name it.

2:31we're just doing everything we can to address the situation on multiple fronts. Well, we just spoke a few minutes ago with Kathy Pajamola. She's in Spokane. Four of her adult kids and their families had to evacuate from their homes in the North Spokane neighborhood of Indian Trail. You're familiar with it. Some of these kids are with her. Some are in hotels. Let's listen to a little. I had grandkids with me and they're asking, are we going to die? Are we I mean, it was just traumatizing. So now I think it's the PTSD and dealing with the aftermath. We're actually heading out here in a minute to bring tables and set up to give away clothes and helping folks have lost everything.

3:11And I'm talking burned down to the ground, only the chimneys left. And that just broke my heart, you know. Yes. And she accurately describes it as people literally losing everything. And, you know, I think the number that we've heard for number of individuals evacuated from Spokane is 60 ,000. Just put a context on that, Robin. The city's population is about 230 ,000. So that gives a sense of scale. When I stay in Spokane, I don't stay in a hotel and I'm visiting the city. I stay with a longtime friend. Their house had to be evacuated, and we don't know what the status of their home is at this time.

3:43And that's just typical for now many, many individuals here in this area. Well, we're going to stay in touch with Kathy. We promised we would. but what we're hearing there is you have to deal with the physical threat. You know, where do people go, how to save lives, get people out? But we're just, we're hearing about the mental health impact. Yes. I mean, I can't really quite imagine going through an experience, and this moved very, very quickly, by the way. This happened in a matter of hours. Things went from a relatively normal situation, high threat of fire, to literally that fire sweeping through neighborhoods and wiping them out.

4:17And so I can only imagine for what that's like for individuals and families to have that experience, to have to evacuate, to try and save their loved ones, their pets, their property. It would be truly traumatizing. Yeah. Look, we've seen this, you know, in Southern California, in Hawaii. It's just astonishing. We know what's happening in your state is being driven by climate change, which is super, super charging it. You've mentioned speaking with President Trump and the federal government. We know that President Trump rejected disaster aid funding for your state last year following a devastating storm.

4:53He approved the funding this year following historic flooding. You know, do you worry that, you know, you might not get it? Well, of course, I worry as governor of my state, I worry about everything when it comes to helping take care of the people of our state. That said, you know, that historical flooding we had, which was another very devastating natural disaster. We appreciate the federal government granting that FEMA request that has helped many people in our state. So far, the response from the federal government has been very, very positive. And like I said, multiple conversations with Secretary Mullen.

5:27We're hearing from others in the federal administration. FEMA has been nothing but cooperative so far. So, you know, my job is to communicate very clearly to everybody from the president on down just how dire and devastating the situation is here. And so far, I believe they have heard that. Governor, we're up against a hard time. You've got 30 seconds. talk to your people. What I want our people to know is we are here for the long haul, that we understand how devastating this is. We're here for the long haul, and you have all the resources of local, state, and federal government coming together to help you in a really, really challenging time, and that we're going to stay here until we get all the help that you need.

6:00Washington Governor Bob Ferguson, thank you so much, Governor, and please, best to you. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

6:15We'll be right back with more news in a minute.

6:21President Trump might be getting his attorney general after all. After Todd Blanche agreed in writing, he would not pursue a fund that would have paid people the president claimed were persecuted by the Biden administration. Blanche, who has been the acting attorney general since April, changed his position on that fund. So Republican Senators John Cornyn and Tom Tillis dropped their opposition to him taking over the role full-time. Sadie Gurman of The Wall Street Journal has more in this conversation with Scott Tong. Basically, these two Republicans were the main holdouts, and their concerns were about the fund specifically.

6:57And other Republicans who have expressed any measure of doubt, it's typically been related to that fund. And so now that this order exists, I expect them to pretty much fall in line and they may even have a vote later this week. All right. And this anti-weaponization fund, you know, the line from the movie, this guy's only partially dead. Is this fund dead for good? Well, I think that's still an open question, actually, because it's unclear to me, at least, whether, you know, what legal binding this has on the president. It's not something that was issued to a court. It's just a letter to a senator.

7:34And so while it is the first time we've had this agreement put in writing. It's still unclear to me if the president could try to resurrect this at a later date. The issue is that when the fund was created, the memo creating it said it could only be changed with the agreement of all the three parties who signed it. So that's the IRS, the Justice Department, and Trump in his personal capacity. Right. So there is a potential possibility, I guess, for this rescission to be rescinded. I mean, are some concerned about that? Well, Trump certainly has said that he still supports the idea of a fund. And in fact, over the weekend was talking about pushing for legislation that would create the fund.

8:16I think appetite for that is pretty low, but nevertheless, it shows his commitment to it. Yeah. Now, even without this anti-weaponization fund, is there a pot of money, a source of money for the president's allies, even today, to see compensation for what they claim as weaponized government against them? Yes. So for many years now, the Justice Department has had access to a fund that Congress has authorized for it to use however it sees fit in order to settle lawsuits. So you've seen lawsuits from people like the Proud Boys, you know, who say that they were prosecuted maliciously and they've sued.

8:55And conceivably, the government could agree with that and pay them out through this particular part of money. Yeah. Now, the settlement creating this fund had this separate provision that would have given broad protection for President Trump and his family from IRS tax audits. In this new order that Todd Blanche has put out, he's narrowing that so that protection is only retroactive. So what potential activities, I guess, going backwards does this clear the Trump family from in the past? Well, it's still kind of unclear what is covered by the word retroactively. But basically, Cornyn had pressed Blanche during his confirmation hearing to be very specific about who this agreement applied to, because the way it was originally written, it was very broad.

9:44It talked about related or affiliated individuals and related companies. But this basically just puts into writing that this part of the agreement is only intended to apply to Trump, two of his sons, and the Trump Organization. And that apparently is sufficient for Cornyn and Tillis. Which means any activity going forward regarding members of the Trump family, I mean, would be grounds. There could be audits there. Yeah. Yes. And it's unclear also if a future administration can come and say, you know, this is just a piece of paper and it's meaningless and then go and, you know, look at him retroactively again.

10:23So it's just unclear, you know, to what extent this is going to be legally binding. Sadie Gurman covers the Justice Department at The Wall Street Journal. Sadie, thank you. Thank you.

10:41Well, it was wrangling with senators over the AG nomination last week. The Trump administration was also meeting with tech industry leaders about new rules governing artificial intelligence. Scott has more on that in just a minute.

11:04The future of artificial intelligence. Is it in Silicon Valley? Is it in China? Well, that question became very timely last month when a new AI model from a Chinese startup showed top-level performance on par with ChatGPT and Claude from Anthropic at far less cost. Now, the White House considers certain Chinese AI products to be a national security threat. So much to discuss now with Ina Fried, who regularly comes on to talk all things AI. Ina, as you may know, is cheap technology correspondent at Axios. Hey, Ina. Hi, Scott. Okay, we have news today to talk to you about. The Trump administration has been planning what it calls a framework for AI companies to share their products with the government before they go on the shelf.

11:46What's the thinking here? What's the latest? So as you kind of gather from your intro, there's two kind of competing priorities here. One is to take on China, and the other is, you know, to kind of figure out how do you regulate these very, very powerful models that are coming out of the U.S. labs. And so the government had said a while back that it was going to have these guidelines by August 1st or 2nd. And now it says it has them, although it's not publicly saying, here are the guidelines, here's who needs to come to us. It's saying we have the guidelines and we're going to talk to the AI companies.

12:22So we don't exactly know what's in those guidelines, which further adds to the lack of clarity here in terms of how you meet these goals. Both goals sound laudable. You know, make sure the U.S. remains competitive. I think most Americans want the U.S. to be competitive. Make sure AI models are safe. I think most people would like safe AI models. But the devil's in the details, as they always say. Yeah, I mean, do we have any general idea, you know, what these companies might share with Washington, you know, before these products go public? Well, I think we've seen a preview in the last month and a half as these guidelines weren't set yet, but we knew that there would be guidelines.

13:05We've had both OpenAI and Anthropic go to the government. In Anthropic's case, because it had to, the Commerce Department halted shipments of Mythos, and then OpenAI, with its last model, went through the government and made sure the government was comfortable with it releasing especially 5.6 SOL, and actually the government was meeting last week in D.C. Sorry, the OpenAI was meeting with the government last week in D.C. on another new model. So I think the idea here is that the companies will go a little bit of time, a couple weeks, a month, that amount of time early to the government, say here's what we're planning to do, here's the safety testing we've done, here's the results.

13:46And presumably the government would say, yeah, we're okay with that. It's still super unclear. Again, the government hasn't helped here by not releasing the guidelines. And supposedly these are supposed to be voluntary. And it seems a lot like mandatory to me. Yeah. Well, and I remember with Mythos, the concern was, you know, is this now this latest super-duper hacker, right? That's going to put at risk American companies or American infrastructure. And that was the reason for the pause at the time. Now, what is the connection here to competition from Chinese AI products? Well, as I said, you've got these two competing goals that are both understandable, but there is some impact of one on the other.

14:31If you slow down the U.S. companies too much, there is this risk that China gets further close to the U.S. or even ahead. And then similarly, if you ban Chinese open source, a lot of U.S. companies are using these Chinese models because they are the best open source models. There are some U.S. alternatives, but they aren't state of the art like the Chinese models. So each of these regulations actually impinges on the other goal. Yeah. And now, you know, I'm going to have to ask you to talk a little bit about what open source. I've also read this term open weight means with regard to these Chinese startups and their AI products.

15:11Yep. So real quick, the old theory of open source or the understanding was something like Linux, where you could download all the code, you could see everything. Everybody could see it. Everything was there. Everyone who wanted to. And open source models, when we say that, we usually don't mean fully open source, that you can see everything. What we mean is open weights, which lets you download it, run it on your own server, see what's sort of being valued. The big advantage is that you can use it in the ways that you want, not that you can see every bit of the code. You don't know what it's trained on.

15:44You don't know exactly how it's deciding what it's deciding, which is another piece of the concern around China, that not only is it giving China an advantage, but potentially at some point there could be something hidden in this code. There could be things that hurt the U.S., that push Chinese approaches, whether that's on a particular topic. You already sometimes see that with sensitive political issues. But, you know, obviously the bigger concern would be, are they using that to hamper U.S. infrastructure or U.S. interests in any way? And, Ina, real quick, can you talk briefly about this latest Chinese AI or product, Kimi K3?

16:25Is that what it is? Yeah, this is the latest in a string of models that are very good, that are nearly as good as some of the top U.S. models from Anthropic and OpenAI. So far, they're not quite the same, but they score very well on benchmarks, and they are more flexible because you can download them and run them on your own equipment, and you can tweak them. Ina Fried, Chief Technology Correspondent for Axios. Ina, thanks as always. Thanks, Scott.

16:54That's it for the show today. Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Thomas Danielian, Hafsa Qureshi, Jill Ryan, and me, Chris Bentley. Our editors were Todd Munt, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green, Matt Reed, and Nick Dussault. I wrote the theme music along with Mike Moschetto and Max Liebman. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And the executive producer of Here and Now is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with you tomorrow. Thank you.